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The Year of Magical Thinking: National Book Award Winner Paperback – February 13, 2007
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.
This powerful book is Didion’ s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.
- Print length227 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateFebruary 13, 2007
- Dimensions5.22 x 0.62 x 7.99 inches
- ISBN-101400078431
- ISBN-13978-1400078431
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From the Publisher
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| Let Me Tell You What I Mean | South and West | Blue Nights | The Year of Magical Thinking | We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live | The Last Thing He Wanted | |
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| From one of our most iconic and influential writers: a timeless collection of mostly early pieces that reveal what would become Joan Didion's subjects, including the press, politics, California robber barons, women, and her own self-doubt. | Here are two extended excerpts from notebooks Joan Didion kept in the 1970s; read together, they form a piercing view of the American political and cultural landscape. | "A New York Times Notable Book and National Bestseller From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter." | A stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. | Includes seven books in one volume: the full texts of Slouching Towards Bethlehem; The White Album; Salvador; Miami; After Henry; Political Fictions; and Where I Was From. | An incisive and chilling look at a modern world where things are not working as they should—and where the oblique and official language is as sinister as the events it is covering up. |
Editorial Reviews
Review
—Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review
“Stunning candor and piercing details. . . . An indelible portrait of loss and grief.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“I can’t think of a book we need more than hers. . . . I can’t imagine dying without this book.”
—John Leonard, New York Review of Books
“Achingly beautiful. . . . We have come to admire and love Didion for her preternatural poise, unrivaled eye for absurdity, and Orwellian distaste for cant. It is thus a difficult, moving, and extraordinarily poignant experience to watch her direct such scrutiny inward.”
—Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Los Angeles Times
“An act of consummate literary bravery, a writer known for her clarity allowing us to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief. . . . It also skips backward in time [to] call up a shimmering portrait of her unique marriage. . . . To make her grief real, Didion shows us what she has lost.”
—Lev Grossman, Time
About the Author
Didion’s first volume of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968, and her second, The White Album, was published in 1979. Her nonfiction works include Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), Where I Was From (2003), We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (2006), Blue Nights (2011), South and West (2017) and Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021). Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005.
In 2005, Didion was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Letters Gold Medal in Criticism and Belles Letters. In 2007, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. A portion of National Book Foundation citation read: "An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years, Didion’s distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature as well as the admiration of generations of writers and journalists.” In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama, and the PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Didion said of her writing: "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” She died in December 2021.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage; Reprint edition (February 13, 2007)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 227 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1400078431
- ISBN-13 : 978-1400078431
- Item Weight : 7.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.22 x 0.62 x 7.99 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,986 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #16 in Author Biographies
- #34 in Women's Biographies
- #125 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Quick review of Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking
George Poulos

About the author

Joan Didion was born in Sacramento in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. After graduation, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue, which led to her career as a journalist and writer. Didion published her first novel, Run River, in 1963. Didion’s other novels include A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996).
Didion’s first volume of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968, and her second, The White Album, was published in 1979. Her nonfiction works include Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), Where I Was From (2003), We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live (2006), Blue Nights (2011), South and West (2017) and Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021). Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005.
In 2005, Didion was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Letters Gold Medal in Criticism and Belles Letters. In 2007, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. A portion of National Book Foundation citation read: "An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years, Didion’s distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature as well as the admiration of generations of writers and journalists.” In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama, and the PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Didion said of her writing: "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” She died in December 2021.
For more information, visit www.joandidion.org
Photo credit: Brigitte Lacombe
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Didion's unflinching account of the sudden loss of her husband (which occurred while their only child was in a coma in a hospital (!)) deserves to be a classic in the genre of books written by and for those who are grieving. It is hard to find books like this, which are both honest but not overly sentimental, not resorting to the tropes which seem to surround death. She doesn't offer vague platitudes or advice. She simply relates her very personal experience, including the inevitable vulnerability, unexpected moments of being blindsided by memories and sudden tears, etc.
She covers all the bases, including the kind of insanity that can seize one in the throes of grief, those moments when you forget the person is actually dead, when you turn to speak to him or her as you normally would at a certain part of the day or reach for the phone to share the latest news.
The book is raw. If you're looking for religous or spiritual guidance and inspiration, this is not the book for you. As Didion herself noted, writing about the book recently, it was intentionally written "raw". I assume she didn't want to wait, to distance herself from the intensity of the experience as she wrote it down, quite unlike many other books she has written. Raw or not, it wasn't sloppy, overly sentimental or complete despairing.
It was simply honest, heartwrenchingly so, and Didion doesn't deviate from communicating, in absolute striking detail, the sense of alienation and disorientation that separates mourners from those who seem to be living "normal" lives. Grief is its own territory, separate from so-called normalcy. In so many ways, it is an illness, an affliction of the spirit and not one that can be cured in any one way.
An aside- the photo of Didion inside the dustjacket is haunting. No question that those are the eyes of someone who has been scraped to the core, wounded and, presumably, still recovering. There is something beautiful in that portrait and, oddly, comforting. It is the face of a survivor, however hard it might be to live as one.
This book will remain on my bookshelf and I expect I'll be thumbing through it for solace time and again. Reading it was both painful and cathartic and strangely comforting, with an intensity that left me awestruck. I am still amazed that she was able to produce such a beautifully written book in the throes of so much pain.
Life and loss happen. We often don’t see them as they stream past us.
Joan Didion’s reflection and journal book slow down and sharpen life and loss.
Whether thinking about one’s own or others, the investment in this work is worthwhile.
Life changes fast.
Life changes in an instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.
She then grapples with the "how" and "why" of these statements and recreates the year after her husband's sudden death at their dining room table, immediately after they had returned from visiting their daughter, Quintana, who lay in a coma in ICU. I think Didion did a wonderful job of this telling - leading us through her journey of questions - reflecting back on seemingly random conversations - and exploring her emotions and psychological struggles as she was going through them. Joan explores her grief through reading and finding out everything she can about what went wrong with her husband and by recreating and reliving that night minute by minute and the weeks and days leading up to his sudden death by heart attack. Many times she reflects the moment with a minus countdown to the date (e.g. twenty three days before life changes, etc).
There were moments of raw emotion, but in some ways the memoir seemed constrained and guarded to me. I think one of the things that made it feel conflicting in this manner was the recency factor - she is writing these thoughts within the year of his passing and not reflecting back years later...but writing in the moment. She ends the memoir only a year and week after his passing. This recency factor probably kept some of the grief from entering the book, while at other times allowing it to come out in ways that would have been lost over time. I think she did an authentic job of opening up the curtains and allowing us to peer into their relationship and life. While her life is very different than mine, she was very human and the window into her life was appreciated and something I embraced. I would not have wanted her to recreate her life for the "common reader". I appreciate that she was genuine in giving us a window into her life and in doing so, we were also able to catch glimpses into her soul and who she is as a person.
I especially appreciated the window into the forty year marriage she shared with John and their partnership - their always working together and the true friendship the seemed to have. From editing each other's articles and books to their travel together. Joan writes that, "marriage is memory, marriage is time." I found myself reflecting on my own marriage and how we truly have time and memory together that no one else has. We have history and this is something that can never be replaced. I've known my wife like no one else since she was eighteen and she has known me as well over the past two decades. I see her both as she was at twenty and as she is at almost forty. It's a wonderful perspective that can only truly be had through the partnership and friendship of marriage or long-term partnership. Where will we be after forty years together and will we be able to look back at a partnership and friendship such as Joan and John shared? I hope so and having shared a glimpse into their relationship I will work harder at ensuring mine lasts.
In glancing at a few of the other reviews I see some are irritated by what they perceive as pretentiousness and name dropping. I disagree. Authenticity is something that I appreciate in memoirs and Joan shared from her experiences and her life. Each of us is on a different path and journey and the wonderful about memoirs is getting a glimpse into someone else's story. I think she opened up and shared her story and while it is different than yours or mine, cutting out the fact that they jetted off to Hawaii or Paris to "escape" stress or that they ate out regularly or had wonderful dinner parties with celebrities and other authors would have been attempting to censor her life and would have not been authentic to who she is as a person.
Overall, the book was very well written and tightly crafted. I didn't particularly care for all of the details around her medical research, but it was her way of dealing with the grief and finding answers and I think it gave the book it's structure and context. I would have appreciated more flashbacks to their forty years together, but this wasn't a memoir of their marriage, but a memoir of the year of grief following his passing, so I think what she wrote worked well in that context.
I'm looking forward to discussing this in our memoir book club next week.
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